Monday, January 01, 2007

Fireside Story

My fireside reading this Xmas was Paul Davies’ latest book “The Goldilocks Enigma”. This book attempts an exhaustive review of contemporary thinking (including Davies own) on the question of why the cosmic order, and physics in particular, are so well contrived to support life: or in terms of the Goldilocks story, why is it that the cosmos is “just right” for living things? For example, amongst many other seemingly fortuitous conditions favouring the existence of living organisms, is the sheer fact that complex organic configurations hold together from one moment to the next. This is proof that the physics and chemistry of matter is such as to favour the sustenance of these configurations on a moment-by-moment basis.

Inevitably with a subject of this nature, Davies is working on the boundaries of knowledge and therefore on his own admission he delves into some pretty exotic and speculative topics. But in spite of the diversity of ideas, a reading of Davies’ book reveals that workers in this esoteric field are hitting the same obstacle again and again, an obstacle I refer to as the “Contingency Barrier”.

Modern physical explanation is about the description of mathematical objects; mathematical objects that in turn are a putative description of our experiences. It is a convenient but seemingly brute fact of our world that as these mathematical objects have been developed they have become increasingly succinct and yet their descriptive power has embraced a wider and wider domain of experience. This process of description effectively means that less and less is being used to describe more and more, a process resembling a kind of conceptual data compression. But like any form of data compression this simplification cannot go on indefinitely, for there comes a point when something has to be taken as given; a hard kernel of fact that cannot be conceptually compressed any further. So, as far is the physical world is concerned we will always be left, to greater or lesser degree, with an irreducible collection of facts that cannot be reduced by further “explanation”: any attempt to “explain” this kernel simply yields yet another kernel and so on. This is the Contingency Barrier. Davies acknowledges that theologians have been aware of this sort of problem for a long while and the Monotheistic solution is to postulate an infinite creator Deity who himself is in some way a “self explaining” entity whose non-existence is a contradiction (a solution that I as a theist favour).

Davies book is probably just about as exhaustive as he could make it, and for me it constituted an excellent, organized and very informative survey of the latest ideas at the speculative forefront of cosmological thinking. However, there was one important issue that I felt Davies was not very explicit about, and that was the subject of idealism, the philosophy that the physical world is a product of mind rather than mind being an incidental by product of matter. In many accounts of cosmology the “third person perspective” is very much taken as granted. That is, it is assumed that it makes sense to talk about an existing cosmos in which there are no observers. It is assumed that the stuff of the cosmos and the laws controlling it in no way depend on the existence of sentient beings or observers. This “materialist” philosophy takes it for granted that matter is primary and sentience is secondary. And yet although this is the default common sense philosophy it is not self-evidently true. In philosophical circles, starting with Hume’s positivism, through Kant’s idealism and ending in today’s concept of virtual reality, there is a strong philosophical tradition that phenomena are not unequivocal evidence for some independent and primary noumena. In fact Berkeley, in his theistic positivism, postulated that those things going “unobserved” (like say the “big bang”) only exist because they register in some way in the mind of God. In short, the abstract cognita of materialism, such as points, lines, coordinates, spaces and loci etc are meaningless unless they are hosted by an advanced mind. In theistic idealism a complex up and running mind is considered primary, and elementary cognita like points, lines, and particles are secondary.

Toward the end of his book however, Davies presents the solutions he himself favours and those solutions, I suppose, do classify as a form of idealism in as much as sentient (non-divine) observers are required in his scheme to imbue the cosmos with reality and meaning. Although I would not classify Davies as an atheist, neither is he a convinced theist. He therefore favours the notion that logical self-containment exists, not within a Divine creator Godhead external to the cosmos, but to somehow reside within the cosmic order itself. (My own opinion is that we will never successfully find logical necessity within the cosmic order, an order that I suspect is of finite complexity. Therefore we will ultimately have to accept the brute contingency of our world - see the contingency conjecture). Even so, Davies ideas are dangerously subversive of the atheistic position, a position that so often unconsciously presupposes the primacy of an impersonal elemental world over against the personal. As Davies says, many will criticize his inclination “as being crypto-religious”. In this latest book of Davies we have what seems to be the nearest thing to a kind of “religious coming out”. I have long waited Davies to commit himself to something. In his previous books like “Superforce” and “The Cosmic Blueprint” it was clear that he is someone who feels there is something very fishy and contrived about the Cosmos. Moreover, he finds the naive materialist response, which greets the contingency barrier with an unquestioning shrug of the shoulders, as inadequate. Davies, in contrast, always comes over as a fair-minded person who is genuinely looking for the truth wherever that might lead him. He lacks the presuppositional prejudices one finds amongst both fundamentalist atheists and theists. But on the notion of a Cosmic Creator he says:

“The other main problem with intelligent design is that the identity of the designer need bear no relation at all to the God of traditional monotheism. The designing agency can be a committee of gods for example. The designer can also be a natural being or beings, such as an evolved super-mind or super-civilization existing in a previous universe, or in another region of our universe, which made our universe using super-technology. The designer can also be some sort of superdupercomputer simulating this universe.”

There is an issue here of just how validly one can extrapolate from a simulated physics to the physics of a surmised “real world” that hosts it. However the general idea here is clear: although the revelation of a mathematically ordered world may point to the existence of some a-priori hyper-complex creating intelligence, that in itself says very little as to the specific nature of that intelligence, e.g. whether it is benign are malign, comprehensible or incomprehensible, personal or impersonal, interested or indifferent etc. The grand rationality of the cosmos is too general a revelation and is simply not enough to inform us about the exact nature and motives of its background Creator, if there is one. A much more specific revelation is needed if the personality of that designer is to be revealed. It is at this point where I part company with Davies. For if there is a God who is deeply personal and, metaphorically speaking, is Father to his creatures then revelation as to His specific personality must be present somewhere in the Cosmos. In seeking this revelation we cannot neglect human history, because if there is a God who is worthy of the name, then human history, past and present may be His agent of revelation. As the book of Hebrews says:“God who at sundry times and in many ways has spoken in times past to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us in the Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, by Whom He also made the worlds. And He, who being the brightness of his glory and the express image of His Person, and who is upholding all things by the Word of his power, when He had purged sins by Himself, He sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high”.This revelation of Christ is grounded in history and in one’s day-by-day walk with God. This is the Revelation of God through Christ. My own opinion is that if there is a personal Father-like God then there are not many other contenders for the title of a quality revelation. It’s Christ or nothing. The average person in the street or in the field does not have access to scientific equipment. Therefore, he has little choice but to get his cosmology from the texts of society, whether those texts are Paul Davies books or historical books like the Bible. And if the Bible isn’t right about Christ being an express revelation? The Bible itself has an answer to that: “… if Christ has not been raised your faith is foolish….”Even though Davies is unlikely to agree that the Divine persona has revealed His full personality through Christ I have to admit that, in actual fact, I feel a stronger connection with people like Davies than with those anti-reason Christians who vehemently identify faith and revelation with fideism. How can one be loyal to Christains who are likely to attack one’s faith as inferior or non-existent, either because it fails to conform to some mindless robotic rulebook misreading of the Bible or alternatively lacks a mystical gnostic union with God? In this world there are many threats to faith, but Paul Davies is certainly not one of them. However, gnostic and rulebook Christains with their sectarian outlook are amongst the worst faith threats and constitute some of the best arguments against Christianity. So in one sense I very much support Davies quest for truth, wish him well, and hope that his pilgrimage brings revelation.

THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION

“Ideas Versus Experience!" is a slogan expressing the uneasy relation between what we think the world to be and what our actual experience suggests it is. Experience makes or breaks ideas. But the reverse is also true: Well established ideas can influence the recognition, acceptance and even the perception of experience. In short there is a two way dialogue between ideas and experience. Sometimes that dialogue can turn into an argument, even a row.

The success of Science is based on a formalisation of this potentially contentious relationship as it seeks to support or refute theoretical notions by systematically comparing them with experience. In the far less formalized contexts of daily living we probably are using a similar heuristic when we display a tendency to drop ideas that lose the confrontation with experience, and retain those that win. Winning ideas, like the gladiators of the Roman arenas, live to fight another day. This Darwinian slant on the struggle for ideological survival is itself ideology that must, for consistency sake, submit itself to the very process it purports to describe. For example, it should be able to give account of the resilience of traditional theories in the face of contra indicators. And in the extreme, explanation also needs to be given of how conspiracy theorists continue to hold on to a ramifying structure of untested elaborations.

Human theoretical visions are often grand and sweeping, confidently affirming states of affairs that are far beyond immediate sensation. The vast unseen domains covered by our best theories contrasts with the limitations on human perceptual resources, resources that only allow a very sparse experimental sampling of our most ambitious ideas. Even a professional scientist only ever tests a small portion of any theoretical structure. Moreover, our theoretical concepts are ambitious enough to cover unreachable areas like the center of distant stars, sub-atomic dimensions, events long past into history, and very complex inscrutable objects like the human mind and its societies. Thus, science is metaphysical in as much as it has to admit that it covers vast domains inaccessible to testing in practice if not in principle. For the intelligent layman even the keyhole view of the experimental scientist may not be available. So whence comes the authority to affirm ideas that are often so grandiose in their sweep that they make claim to impinge upon the very meaning of life the universe and everything?

The fact is that for most of us the really big ideas diffuse through to us from our societal context, and at most these big ideas are only illuminated here and there, at a very few places, with actual direct experience of the phenomenon they conceptualise. These big ideas float around in the ether-like-media of society in the form of books, lectures, programmes, and the Internet etc, objects that the postmodernist philosophers call "texts".

For someone such as myself the battle to make sense of life was joined as soon as I was aware of mystery. But looking back it is clear to me that I haven't done an honest scientific experiment in the whole of my life. For me the effort to bring sense and integration to the complexity of life boils down to grappling with the many texts of society; These texts carry both big theoretical ideas and raw data from which ideas crystallize. These texts are compared with other texts in the search for coherence and consistency. These texts take the place and role of experiments as one tests theories using texts. These texts are in effect the experience of life. My own modest attempt at grandiose theorising has already been presented to the world. (See this blog "Physics and the Wild Web") and my excuse is that I have simply inherited the theoretical hubris of the human race.

The postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida said, "There is nothing outside the text". I think he was at least right about the primary role texts play in the life of those like myself whose instinct has been to grapple relentlessly with the riddles of life, and to seek out meaning and go where no man has gone before. But one could equally claim, "There is nothing outside the experience". For one might read the "text" of the clouds in the sky as a predictor of impending weather just as one reads socially generated symbolic configurations as the predictor of certain kinds of thought or potential experience. For the text is just as much an experience as more primeval phenomenon like thunder and lightning. Texts are part of our cosmic experience and they imperceptibly grade into the more conventional notion of experience. Where the crossover point is, is difficult to say.

Postmodernism may have got it right about the primary role of the text, but it has made one very serious mistake. Where I would radically differ from the postmodern view is that I believe the mass of social texts, if we allow them, naturally converge upon grand consistent narratives and those narratives are here to stay. And that is because these texts, I submit, are part of a world with an underlying rational integratedness and that integratedness is being revealed to us bit by bit. For revelation it is: Revelation is what we cannot discover unless God chooses that we discover it. My perceptions and reason, limited though they may be, were not self-made, they had to be discovered as gifts. These gifts are given to all of us; one can but trust and use them. Reason is a grace of Revelation. For this reason the hubris of theory making is justified.